Welcome to my new column, Pretty Interesting! Capsule has given me the opportunity to write about some truly epic humans I have met who march to the beat of their own drum and who have genuinely inspired me recently.
I feel oddly proud that I have mended my algorithm enough to no longer be force-fed a constant stream of negative news and collective trauma when I scroll. There is a privilege in protecting your mental health this way, even if it means remaining a little ignorant to certain things. And yet, if I am honest, a lot of feel good stories can lack the punch to really hold my attention. There is a strange duality in wanting something juicy and compelling without feeling like you are reading a glossy puff piece.
This column is my attempt to sit right in that tension – human, honest and a little sharp around the edges.
You can read the first column – a chat with Kiwi writer/director Taylor Nixon here. And, in the second column I chatted with restauranter, Michael Dearth and the third, I chatted to writer/director Rachel Ross. This week I chat with Toni Anne Glover, who is one of the geniuses behind the Kinloch Wilderness Retreat.
Some places in the world feel different the moment you arrive and Kinloch is one of those places.
The road from Queenstown winds along Lake Wakatipu, the mountains slowly closing in around you until suddenly the landscape opens up into Glenorchy and you realise you have arrived somewhere a little bit special.
When you pull into Kinloch Wilderness Retreat, they say it is “nestled in nature” and it truly is. The scenery is immaculate in that dramatic South Island way, but there is also something else about the place that is harder to describe. Time seems to slow down a little there, like it often does in places that hold a bit of magic.
If wholesome and nourishment were words that had universal feelings attached to them, I suspect they would look a lot like Kinloch.
It also happens to be one of the most meaningful places in my life.
Tom and I had our first little getaway there four years ago, long before we had any idea it would later become the backdrop for our wedding day. Tom also used to go there for school camp many moons ago (which he will absolutely hate me for sharing, cause it makes him sound older than he is).
When we were travelling around the South Island looking for a place to get married, we arrived at Kinloch and almost immediately looked at each other and thought, well… this is it. The entire family (all 42 of us) can fit. It would be like camp. A wholesome camp. And so it was decided.
The only small challenge was that while Kinloch does host weddings, it only allows a small number each year and the lodge is often fully booked, which can make securing the full property for a larger wedding difficult. They host many intimate celebrations though. Small weddings, elopements and engagements that fit beautifully with the spirit of the place.
So we did what any slightly determined couple would do. We gently convinced Toni and John that our vision aligned with their ethics and values and together we came up with what ended up being one of the most magical days of my life. We teamed up with Kiwi small businesses and created something that was both epic, and sustainable.
At 10:30am on a crisp, late April Monday morning, forty two of our closest family and friends gathered in one of the most breathtaking corners of the world. Kinloch became the backdrop to our magic moment and a magic moment for our entire family. All forty two of us held by John and Toni in their very special place.
Which brings me to the real reason for this story. Although I do hope you enjoyed my slightly poetic intro.
Meet Mrs. Toni Anne Glover.
Over the past four years of getting to know Toni I have realised she is almost unlike anyone I have crossed paths with, which makes her the perfect subject for Pretty Interesting.
Before meeting Toni I will admit something that might make me sound a little ignorant. I always thought sustainability and “woo woo” lived at one end of a spectrum and tech and AI lived somewhere at the complete opposite end. In my mind they were separate worlds.
After many conversations with Toni’s beautiful brain I have come to realise that actually sustainability, technology and artificial intelligence have this fascinating little Venn diagram moment where they overlap.
And Toni lives right in the middle of it.
On the surface, Kinloch looks like a peaceful wilderness retreat, but beneath that calm exterior is an incredibly thoughtful and intelligent operation quietly experimenting with how hospitality, sustainability and technology can coexist. When I asked Toni about the original vision for Kinloch, her answer was beautifully simple.
“The original vision was to create a place where people could stop and stay in a beautiful natural setting with a rich history.”
But like many meaningful ideas, the vision slowly evolved.
“Over time it has become somewhere people leave feeling better than when they arrived. It is now about nourishment, sleep, grounding and perspective. Less about beds, more about impact.”
At some point Kinloch quietly crossed a line from accommodation to something that feels a little closer to a sanctuary. Toni remembers a moment when that realisation landed. An Anglican priest once told her, “Toni, you do ministry here.” Later during some branding work someone else said, “You got me with spirituality.” That was the moment she realised Kinloch was not just a place people stayed, it was a place where people reset.
One of the things that fascinates me most about Toni is the way her brain works. She is a systems thinker and a steward at the same time. Someone deeply connected to the land while also endlessly curious about the future. It is the sort of brain that can talk about soil health one minute and artificial intelligence the next and somehow make both feel connected.
Her journey into sustainability actually started very practically. Kinloch is remote, so waste and energy matter in a very real way when you are running a business there. Waste management and the logistics of operating responsibly in such an isolated place were some of the first things that required real attention.
Toni actually studied tourism earlier in her career while living in the UK, completing tourism studies at Birmingham University in 1994 and 1995. Over time her thinking evolved as she read and learned more about carbon and the wider environmental impact of industries like hospitality. The book Factfulness and the work of Hans Rosling were particularly influential in shaping the way she began to look at the bigger picture.
As she explained to me, once you properly measure carbon everything changes. “Once we measured accurately, sustainability stopped being optional.” The data makes things very clear very quickly and you cannot really look away from it once you understand the numbers.
One thing that surprised me in our conversation is that sustainability in tourism is not actually as much about waste as people might assume. According to Toni, the real challenge is energy and fossil fuels. Heating, electricity and transport make up the largest portion of the footprint and tourism, by its very nature, can be carbon intensive. The real work is not perfection, it is transparency and reduction. If I have lost you already, stick with me, because this is not your standard save the planet chat!
This is where her curiosity about technology and artificial intelligence begins to intersect with sustainability in a really interesting way. Toni has been exploring AI long before it became part of everyone’s daily vocabulary. She laughed when she told me she has always been a bit of a tech geek and that reading about the Economic Singularity around 2014 sent her down a rabbit hole she has never really climbed out of. I was not sure what that even was so I relied on ChatGPT to tell me. I now get the joke.
Today she uses AI in ways many people would never expect inside a remote wilderness lodge. Rather than replacing people, she sees it as a thinking partner that helps surface blind spots and support decision making in a business that involves thousands of small operational choices every week.
But what I love most about her perspective is that the technology is never the point. The point is creating more space for the human side of hospitality.
As Toni put it to me, “AI handles systems. Humans hold emotion.” Automation quietly takes care of the friction behind the scenes so the team can focus on being present with guests, which is really what hospitality should be about in the first place. I must say, as an actor this really hit home as it is the same in our field. AI are not human storytellers.
There is also something deeply maternal about Toni’s leadership style. It is something people often mention when they talk about her and I have felt it myself spending time at Kinloch. But it is not softness without strength. There is also a quiet Mumma Bear energy about her that makes you lean in when she speaks.
When I asked her what maternal leadership means to her, she described it as caring about the whole ecosystem. People, land and culture all at once. But she was also clear that nurturing needs boundaries.
“Care without accountability is not sustainable.”
It felt like one of those sentences that applies to far more than just business.
Motherhood itself has also shaped the way she approaches leadership. As she explained it, becoming a parent rewires your brain. (Don’t I know it!) Your perspective shifts and even when you are doing the same job you were doing before, your gaze changes slightly because your children are always somewhere in the frame of your thinking.
Of course, running a carbon conscious business in a tourism town is not always easy. Toni spoke honestly about the tension that sometimes exists between sustainability branding and the reality of tourism’s environmental impact. It is one thing to talk about sustainability, and another thing entirely to measure it properly and live by the results.
Like many business owners she has had moments where the responsibility has felt incredibly heavy. Staffing challenges, operational pressure and the constant balancing act of values and viability have all tested her at different points.
But what keeps her going is a very simple belief.
Kinloch matters.
When I asked her what hospitality might look like ten years from now if we get it right, her answer actually sounded a lot like the experience of being at Kinloch today. She imagines a future where hospitality becomes regenerative and calm, where intelligent systems run quietly in the background while humans are deeply present with one another and with the environment around them.
It is a vision that feels both modern and ancient at the same time.
Before we finished our conversation I asked Toni one final question. If someone walked away from their stay at Kinloch feeling just one thing, what would she want that to be?
Her answer came quickly.
“Centred.”
And honestly, that is exactly how I felt walking down the gravel path after our wedding ceremony two years ago. Centred, held and very aware that places like Kinloch do not just exist by accident.
They exist because people like Toni Anne Glover care deeply enough to build them that way and I am so freaking glad she and John did.